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Don’t Sleep

The Internet provides many excellent opportunities for embarrassment. People are so enthusiastic about embracing these opportunities that it may be categorically inaccurate to think of them as embarrassments. In parallel, reality television has grown around the increasingly plausible idea that the pleasure brought on by fame can blot out any negative side effects of public exposure (shame, self-loathing, etc.). The Internet is proving the same principle, but for less pay. Do you and your coworkers like dancing to Soulja Boy? Show us! But back in the Victorian age of the Web, some people were sharing private moments with the world without knowing it.

Back around 2001 there arose a “perfect storm” of technological innovations which made possible audio files I call “mic in tracks”. This was right around the time that Napster was just beginning to penetrate into the average computer user’s lives. At the same time, an audio utility program called MusicMatch Jukebox was also being widely used, since it was often pre-installed on off-the-shelf PC’s. MMJ allowed you, among other things, to make recordings using the cheap microphone included with the PC, and save the file in mp3 format. If you didn’t give the audio file a name, it assigned a default name “mic in track” followed by a number. Now if you were also running Napster, and you were careless enough to be sharing everything on your computer (which *many* were), then anyone also running Napster could just do a search for “mic in track” and find and download these personal recordings, usually without your knowledge.